“Halloween: Resurrection” Marked Tragic Low for Beloved Franchise

Rick Rosenthal’s “Halloween: Resurrection” (2002) has no opening credits that harken back to the jack-o-lantern themed introductions of the prior films.

We just get orange letters but no proper opening, an indication from the get-go that something is off.

An introduction with two chatty hospital nurses douses the viewer in exposition and quickly erases one of the best shocks of the previous “Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later” (1998), which definitively concluded the entire series.

Not so, explains a nurse, who hits us with “Oh my God, she killed the wrong guy!”

It turns out Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode didn’t actually terminate Michael Myers. More of this last-scene-of-“Scooby-Doo”-like dialog insists that Strode killed the wrong guy in a Myers-planted swithcheroo, because the wrong guy’s “larynx had been crushed.”

Okay, but then why did the guy act like Myers? If it was the wrong guy, then the unintended victim was awfully convincing doing everything you never want to do in order to stop someone from killing you.

In other words, what a croc.

The nurses simply should have said, “Michael Myers is still alive…because ‘Halloween H20’ made $55 million.” No further explanation needed.

We also learn that Strode is in this very hospital, which also houses a chatty inmate who is quick with lists of real serial killers. Thank goodness for all these talkative, exposition-filled side characters!

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Strode’s POV of picking up a knife is a nice nod to the opening of the original film. Curtis’ participation was what made me see this opening weekend in theaters (with a rowdy audience that was all-too-happy to yell out their favorite lines from “Scary Movie” during certain moments).

The big confrontation between Strode and Myers is oddly front-loaded, the top of the first act, pre-credit stinger, like how a James Bond movie opens. It’s the film’s best scene, though “best” is a word I’d use loosely, since what transpires is hard to get worked up over.

It seems Strode set a trap for Myers and the device in question wouldn’t be out of place in a “Home Alone” sequel.” I won’t give away what happens, but it’s not great.

Also, Strode kisses Myers before she falls out of frame (and the movie) why?! Myers then gives the deranged inmate his knife like a gift at a family gathering (another big Why Did That Just Happen?).

After the prologue, which was enough to lure me and most of the fans who thought they had said goodbye to this franchise back in ’98, “Halloween: Resurrection” becomes a new movie.

We’re now in a peppy, very-MTV Total Request Live feeling movie, in which a group of young people are being recruited to take part in a new Reality TV concoction deemed “Dangertainment.”

The gist is that the group of young adults (which includes Katee Sackhoff in her second film role, Thomas Ian Nicholas of “American Pie” and Sean Patrick Thomas of “Save the Last Dance”) have

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